Today’s organisation seeks to achieve a balance between risk and opportunity. This, in turn, influences decisions about the type of accountants it recruits and develops. Having accountants with a deep specialism is one way that a company can differentiate itself from others and develop business opportunities that come with having high-calibre intellectual capability. Likewise, specialising is a means of managing complexity and the accompanying risk that comes with it.

But organisations need more than technical specialists; they also need good people managers with business development skills. It was ever thus, and there is a place for the specialist just as there is for the non-specialist manager.

Organisational drivers greatly influence the career opportunities available in a business. These opportunities may also be cyclical. For instance, the value placed on a specialist role is only as high as the availability of those skills and knowledge and the demand for them at any particular time – for example, the demand for IT professionals leading up to the millennium or Sarbanes-Oxley specialists up to the end of last year.

Specialisation can be a highly valuable asset, but, as with many assets, a particular specialisation can depreciate in value. The key to career success is an individual’s ability to ‘reinvent’ their specialism or find a niche within their existing specialism.

Accountants need to make fine judgments early on in their careers about whether and when they wish to specialise. The pull to specialise early on can often be considerable, but giving in to it could limit future opportunities for career development.

Through our own extensive consultation with employers, we know that some encourage their staff to specialise from day one. While there are undoubtedly sound business reasons for doing so, it is a risky strategy as it limits an individual’s abilities and knowledge.

Although certain areas of the accountancy profession will always demand a specialist – a forensic accountant, a tax expert or a corporate governance guru – recent research points to the rise of the finance generalist in the profession as the century advances. Employers will need to future-proof their recruitment and human capital management strategies to cope with significant global challenges.

This was the central premise of a recent study. In 2020, businesses will be faced with more complexity, compliance and risks. As a result, their accountants will need to be less specialists, and more decisive and focused on steering a company through its challenges. The study described the ideal type of accountant as a ‘company navigator’.

A balance needs to be struck by structuring education to give trainees the option to decide the areas they want to specialise in only when they reach the final stages of their course. When they qualify it is not the end but the start of a promising and fulfilling career.

It used to be the case that an accountant’s career route started within a practice, typically in audit. The three-year grounding was felt to offer an excellent breadth of experience, giving the trainee an insight into and understanding of how businesses work.

But recent developments have seen the proliferation of career development routes, with trainee accountants working in financial services and public sector organisations, gaining sound management and technical experience. Likewise, accountancy practices provide the option of starting out in tax, corporate finance, corporate recovery and forensic accounting – each quite significant but specialist fields.

Trend-setting

This trend towards early specialisation has two drivers: the need to attract high-calibre recruits seeking an exciting challenge, and the need to maximise the value that each individual contributes to a business’s goals. Given talent shortages and the pressure to improve business performance, this trend should continue, at least for the short term.

On-the-job training and more study is essential in the finance profession – regardless of whether an individual intends to specialise or not. Continuous professional development (CPD) should aim to ensure that learning and development are relevant to accountants at all stages of their career.

For those who would like to specialise after qualification, there is the decision about how to develop relevant knowledge and skills. We find that the ethos of continuing professional development, together with an awareness of the need to develop and a wider range of learning opportunities, has been of great benefit. Combined with good performance management, CPD provides a framework within which people can set their career development goals and construct the best-fit development activities to meet those goals.

Accountants should be encouraged to seek out opportunities to develop through experience – for example, by working on new projects. We also provide access to specialist qualifications and career development routes such as e-learning modules, MBAs and post-qualification awards with leading universities. The idea is to give individuals the tools to build the best package for their goals and aspirations.

Research into the CPD needs of our membership provides a useful insight into the direction accountants are taking their careers. For instance, 95% of accountants in west Africa, 87% in the Caribbean and 83% in eastern Europe say they need more CPD in the field of corporate finance. Global scores are also high for financial reporting, especially in east Africa (97%) and western Europe (83%), while more training and development in taxation is seen as a need by 88% of members in Asia and 79% in Australasia.

Important skills in which accountants say they require professional development include business writing, effective communication, meeting management, presentations, relationship building and influencing. This suggests that there is an appreciation of the need to improve the effective delivery of technical knowledge through management skills.

The rise of the career generalist – the company navigator – is already under way.

Clare Minchington is managing director of education, learning and development at ACCA